


People of coming days will know about the casting out of my net

by dandeliontea



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate universe - different kinds of monster(s), M/M, Mild Suicide Ideation, Monster Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-10-17
Updated: 2020-10-17
Packaged: 2021-03-08 19:07:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27061675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dandeliontea/pseuds/dandeliontea
Summary: Martin takes a trip to the seaside and discovers something rather strange about his boss.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 19
Kudos: 79





	1. a nighttime stroll

**Author's Note:**

> Context notes:  
> Skegness is a slightly shite seaside resort town in the Midlands. As far as I‘m aware Londoners never go there/don’t know it exists, so Martin would be pretty safe assuming he’d see no one he knows.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You’re just... creating worms worms for yourself. Metaphorically speaking.”

Skegness isn’t, in Martin’s opinion, the worst location to holiday. The beach is a better place to wander than the London streets at night — open twenty four hours, even — and there’s a chippy open late that understands just the right amount of vinegar-soaked a meal needs to be to properly sting the tongue. And it’s still term time, and there’s a storm that’s been looming and darkening the sky for days now, _ and _ it’s a weekday after all that, so the long stretches of sand are almost entirely empty. Martin has spotted a few wanderers like himself along the sand, but they’re each going on their own lonely little ways, and they avoid his eyes in much the same way that he avoids theirs. It is also, by a stroke of remarkable convenience, the last place that his colleagues or any pursuing worms are likely to find him.   


The whole affair feels melancholy, but in a romantic kind of way. A tortured poet walking along the nighttime beach next to the frothing waves, kicking through discarded beer cans and polystyrene kebab cases. Martin plays himself some mood music while he walks at first, but then realises that he probably won’t be able to find his way back to the hostel by memory, and so leaves his phone alone in his pocket to save the battery in case he needs to use it for navigation later, scrunching his earphones into a tight ball in his jacket pocket. But the lack of music no great loss. Martin’s rather in the mood for the sounds of the beach. The crunch of damp sand beneath his shoes; the soft whooshing of his own breaths; the distant howl of the wind; the ever-more-distant thump of club music coming from someone’s house party. And any noise that isn’t squirming or screaming or knocking, that’s a blessed relief. And if he had his headphones in, he might miss something dangerous creeping up behind him, mightn’t he? 

God, no, he doesn’t want to think about all of that, not even obliquely. This is a little holiday ,  and Martin is determined to enjoy it.

“A holiday,” Martin mutters aloud to himself. “There are no monsters in Skegness, you paranoid idiot.”

He stops and glowers out across the waves as he fails to convince himself of it. There’s no stars and no moon visible, just layers of heavy autumn cloud and the sea boiling and frothing before him, black waves tipped by pale reflections, violent and sharp and unfriendly. If Martin tried to take a swim in this ocean he gets the sense that it would rip him apart faster than any worms. Drowning sounds like it would hurt, but at least he won’t come out of it twisted and wrong and  inhabited . It wouldn’t last so long, either, surely not — there would be the shock of the cold waves, and then hopefully he’d get his head dashed on some underwater rocks nice and easy, and then he wouldn’t have to throw up into the grimy Institute toilets at night, spitting and shuddering at the phantom sensation of something slick and squirming against his neck. He wouldn’t be driven to furious bouts of pacing and shaking at the sound of pipes banging as the old building settled in for the night, or the smell of preserved fruit, or the glimpses of worms that had followed him to the Institute. He would be...

Well. He’d be dead.

Martin lets out a long, frustrated breath. He doesn’t want to die, he just wants to  not be scared . Is that so much to ask? Is that so fucking unreasonable?

He picks up a little rock and tosses it into the waves. It makes a quiet little splash at it sinks, and then drops to the sand below, or perhaps gets swept away.

“Didn’t even make me feel better,” Martin complains to the waves, and turns away.

“What are  you doing here?” comes a familiar voice from the ocean, sharp and disbelieving, and Martin spins round again to fast that he almost falls over.

There, getting thoroughly lashed by the water and soaking wet in his work suit, his glasses hanging on for dear life on the end of their little gold chain, sits Jonathan Sims. His hair is plastered damply to his face.

“I... Am I hallucinating?” Martin asks him, after a few moments of disbelieving silence — or asks the empty night, perhaps.

“I don’t know how I would know that,” Jon tells him, with a sharp little huff. “And were I a hallucination, why would I be inclined to tell you that I weren’t?” He folds his arms over his jumper, which is the deep maroon of dried blood in the darkness, although Martin recognises it as a paler, pinker sort of red under the harsh fluorescent lights of the Institute. “Although I am _not_ a hallucination, of course.”

Martin raises a hand to his forehead, and then his own cheek. He doesn’t feel feverish, but Jon also doesn’t disappear or fade back into the ocean, as he rightly should. “Um. Okay. Okay. Well, I... I-I mean,  _ I‘m _ taking some time off by the beach, like a normal person. What are— are  _ you _ doing in  there ?”

Jon tilts his chin so that he can look down his nose at Martin properly. He’s significantly shorter than Martin is, and he’s usually sitting at his desk anyway, so Jon has perfected the art of looking down at Martin from any angle, and his night-lit eyes seem far brighter than they should be, all reflection between the dark shadows of his lashes. “So you can take a holiday and I can’t?”

Martin pinches himself hard enough to sting, but he doesn’t wake up, and neither does Jon dematerialise. “I don’t mean to, um, state the obvious, but you’re... you’re sitting in the water? At night?”

As though Jon could have missed it. He looks down the beach, away from Martin. “Yes,” he says. “Well.”

“Is there a reason why?” Martin prods him. He shivers just looking at the man — the sea must be frigid. The night air certainly is. This is so incredibly surreal that he’s working mostly on autopilot, it feels like.

“There is a reason,” says Jon. “Obviously.” _Don’t be an idiot, Martin_ sits beneath those words, and the tone is so familiar that Martin very nearly accepts it at face value. But the silence stretches on after that while Martin waits for whatever his  very obvious reason is, and Jon seems lost for words.

And then, just as Martin opens his mouth to say something else, Jon turns and dives under the waves. Martin lurches forwards, but it takes no time at all for Jon to completely disappear, and Martin stops as he gets ankle-deep in water. Martin wouldn’t be able to find him if he tried in this darkness and with how unexpectedly fast Jon had moved, like a darting little minnow into the night.

“What the fuck?” Martin asks the sky, which says nothing in response. He raises a hand and rubs vigorously at his eyes, and steps forward to peer over the ocean again, but he doesn’t see a dark head come up again, or a storm-tossed body.

The stress must be getting to him, then. It shouldn’t be a surprise after all that’s happened, but Martin had been somewhat convinced that he’d gotten over the worst of his weird trauma reactions, that he’d gotten used to living in a state of constant, nauseating horror.

Martin backs himself squelchingly out of the ocean. His shoes and socks are soaked now, and he was right before: the water is icy cold. There’s absolutely no way that Jon —  Jon , whose teeth have been known to start chattering on a mild summer’s day without a jumper on — had been taking a brisk evening swim in the North Sea in full archival gear, at exactly the same time and in exactly the same place that Martin had been taking his own brisk evening walk.

He’ll mention it to Jon, maybe, on Monday. Say something like this:

“So, Jon, do anything nice this weekend?”

And Jon will say: “No, Martin, I didn’t,” in an exasperated monotone, as though the question were ludicrous, and as if Martin’s intrusion borders on the offensive, because that is what he always says when Martin asks, and always how he says it. And Martin will laugh nervously, and sneak a glance at Jon’s slender, beautiful fingers as they stroke along the buttons of a tape recorder or they keyboard of his clunky PC and he’ll ache inside, ever so slightly.

Martin sighs and unlocks his phone, turning to trek back to the dingy little hostel room he’s staying in. Clearly the night breeze isn’t doing anything for his mental state, so he might as well try and get some sleep while he still has the chance — plus, there’s the serious concern of frostbite if he were to go walking around like this too long, in his splashing wet and ever-so-slightly-sandy shoes.  
  


“It’s fine,” he mumbles to himself when he gets back to his room in the hostel and into bed. It‘s childish, maybe, but he’s been thrown so off-kilter by the unexpected interruption to his evening that he feels like he has to... self-soothe, just a bit. He hugs himself from shoulder to shoulder and brings the covers over his head until he’s well and truly cocooned. “It’s —  _ fine _ . Kind of a n-natural reaction to trauma, isn’t it? First times away from the worms in a while so you’re just... creating worms for yourself. Metaphorically speaking.”

His stomach twists disbelievingly at him, but he pushes back the trepidation through sheer force of will. He’ll be back to the Institute on Monday, and Jon will be there, and it’ll all be fine and normal.

(He’d told himself the same thing in his flat the first few nights that Prentiss had been outside. What the hell does Martin know about  _ fine  _ or _ normal  _ anymore?)

He drifts off eventually, far later than he’d have liked. And in his dreams Jon is there, dripping black saltwater all over the carpet and with scalpel-sharp teeth bared, his eyes round and dark and fixed unerringly on Martin’s sleeping form. 


	2. in the sea. where else?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Martin has a strange morning, and two very different conversations.

Martin had formulated a lot of plans for his weekend out by the seaside, he honestly had. He’d looked up ‘Best Things To Do In Skegness’, and checked TripAdvisor for secret spots that the locals don’t want tourists to know about (he hadn’t found any online, but that was probably better, wasn’t it? This way he could find them for himself), and he’d turned up at the station an hour and a half early to ensure he didn’t miss his train. There’s a list in his notebook and everything, full of lovely beach-themed ideas. 

But now it’s ten thirty on Saturday morning, and Martin is fully dressed but lying on his back in bed. The non-events of the night before seem even more cartoonishly absurd now than they had at the time — although his shoes are still damp, so something happened.

“Ugh,” he says aloud to himself, and sits up, swings his legs over the side of the bed. He gets like this sometimes, all tangled up in his thoughts. That is precisely the reason he’d gotten himself all excited about the seal sanctuary and the beaches and the as-of-yet-undiscovered cute little ice cream shops, because otherwise he’ll just do what he always does on weekends at home: laze about and feel sorry for himself. Maybe have a cry in the shower if it’s been a particularly draining week. Write some poetry about it if he’s in a creative mood, which is the highlight of most of his weekends — still sad, but sad in a productive way, because there’s nothing Martin hates more than being useless. 

No. Martin’s going to take a stand before he traps himself in the well-work cycle of feel useless-do nothing-feel more useless. He will have a nice day out on the town, and he won’t go for any more nighttime walks. 

He wanders around the hostel for a little while until he finds a sweet elderly Polish woman in the grubby kitchen who likes that he speaks the language, and he musters up the courage to ask to borrow her hairdryer after only about ten minutes of small talk and pretending he understands more Polish than he does. Thankfully, she reverts to English after a few minutes, probably noticing how rusty he is. His accent’s probably gone all to hell, considering how long it’s been. 

She lends him the dryer gladly, and he manages to get his shoes to a serviceable level of dryness within twenty minutes of blasting them with hot air on a kitchen stool, nodding along vaguely to her stories as he does. After Martin’s shoes are done, he sticks around in the hostel kitchen for bit and chats with her, because if he left immediately he’d feel a little bit like he was only using her for her appliances. 

“You are a nice young man,” she tells him firmly, as he hands her the hairdryer back. “Not like some of the others here.”

“Oh?”

“Very rude. Yes, very rude.“ She taps the table emphatically, as though she’s trying to warn Martin of something, grey brows drawn firmly over her eyes. “And very strange. My — ah — an uncle, but child?”

“Nephew?” Martin guesses. 

“Yes, nephew. He sees a man, last night. Swimming! At night!”

“Ah,” Martin says. His collar is very suddenly tight, and his fingers tingle. He clears his throat a few times. Surely not, he thinks to himself, with great severity. Martin Blackwood, be sensible about this. “He... um... y-you mean, like, in the sea?”

“Of course in the sea. Where else? Yes, in the sea.” She mutters something else to herself in Polish, too fast for Martin to understand. 

He wishes he’d made himself some tea for this — something to hold, something to wet his dry mouth with. “M-Maybe he was skinny dipping?” The woman stares at him in confusion; clearly skinny dipping isn’t in her repertoire of English phrases. Martin hesitates and then asks, “Um, was he wearing... clothes?”

“Oh! Yes. A suit! Even more strange.”

“A suit,” Martin echoes. Fuck, fuck, fuck. What the hell is happening? Is this hallucination turning into full-on delusion? Is this some kind of bizarre, extremely convoluted prank? He runs a hand through his hair. “I... okay. That’s weird.”

“Yes,” the woman agrees. 

“God.” Martin runs his hands through his hair again, brings both of them back over his face and then laughs into his palms, tight and disbelieving. “You know what, weird doesn’t even cover it!” He takes a few deep, shaking breaths. Don’t hyperventilate in public, Martin, for god’s sake. The woman hesitates somewhere around his shoulder, and Martin can hear her shift from foot to foot, probably wondering if she should interfere as he teeters on the edge of a breakdown and so he makes her decision for her, standing abruptly. “It was nice to meet you,” Martin manages to squeeze out. He didn’t even get her name — how rude is that? His mum would give him a slap for that if she heard about it, and he’d probably deserve it. “Um. Sorry. I’ve got a... a thing. I forgot about it, I-I— but it was nice to meet you! I just have to...”

Martin’s face feels both hot and cold at the same time, and he’s kind of worried he might be about to have a panic attack in front of this nice lady who just lent him her hairdryer, so he just gives her an awkward wave and bolts. 

He makes it to the hostel bathroom without incident and stares into his reflection. His reflection stares back with a manic tilt to its grimace and exhausted grooves under its eyes, its knuckles white as it clutches the sink. This can’t be as strange as it seems, can it? He must have imagined Jon in the sea — although that still leaves the problem of some other guy taking a dip on the same evening, by sheer outlandish coincidence. Or maybe Martin saw that other guy out of the corner of his eyes and that inspired his hallucination. Or maybe! Maybe his entire life is totally bizarre and everything is spiralling out of his control and all he can do is sit and watch and, and eat canned peachesabout it! 

Martin’s lungs expand sharply without his permission. He forces out a nice and slow breath. There’s no way that this is what it looks like. Except that he’s already had enough experience with the supernatural to know that that isn’t true, isn’t that right? He’s gone through things much more sinister than his boss maybe stalking him and taking a dip in the ocean at night. 

He should probably tell someone, though, shouldn’t he?

Yes he should. Martin splashes his face with water, reaches for his phone, and then immediately flinches back as his fingers touch his pocket. Who is he even going to call? He can’t tell Jon, probably wouldn’t have even it weren’t about him. He doesn’t have Elias’s number, and the Head of the Institute doesn’t strike Martin as the friendly, understanding type, anyway. Sasha and Tim, maybe, but... God, he’s going to sound crazy, and he likes them. 

“Probably going to sound it because you are crazy,” he mutters to himself. 

“What?” a guy in the stalls asks. 

Martin squeaks and leaps almost off his feet. “Oh! N-nothing, sorry, just— just leaving. Sorry!”

“S’alright,” the stranger grunts as Martin crashes out of the loo. He speed-walks through the blandly decorated corridors and out of the hostel as fast as he can, hunching his shoulders against a harsh, bitter wind when it strikes him. The wind is good, really. Clears his head a bit and cools him off. He’s so used to the stale, dusty air of the archives. He spent two long weeks getting used to the damp musk of worms and his own body odour. He appreciates fresh air more now than he ever has in life. Bracing, that’s the word for it. It’s bracing. 

Martin takes his phone out as though it’s a venomous snake and looks through his contacts. He needs to choose: to call either Tim or Sasha. He’ll lose his nerve if he doesn’t do it now. 

Now. His thumb hovers over Sasha’s number. There’s a cute little heart next to it. 

Come on, do it now. He scrolls to Tim’s name, which has two hearts next to it because he’d wanted to one-up Sasha. Martin can’t call about this, surely. What if he sounds like an idiot? He and Tim are work friends, and Martin kind of wants them to be real friends one day. Would this ruin it?

For the love of all— do it now, Martin! 

Martin squeezes his eyes shut and taps, like if he can’t see himself doing it then it isn’t really happening at all. It takes a few rings for Tim to pick up, and he sounds a little out of breath when he does. “Y’ello?”

“Tim! Hi.”

“Yep, that’s me. Hi Martin. Please don’t tell me this is a work thing, I’ve already had Jon trying to harangue me into doing research for him way too last night — two in the morning, can you believe that? I told him exactly whose arse he could shove that up, of course. Word of advice: if he hasn’t already gotten to you, don’t pick up.” 

“Uh, I... n-no, Jon hasn’t called me. Actually, that’s what I wanted to talk to you about?”

“Jon not calling you?” Tim asks, and then makes a sad noise, all exaggerated sympathy. “Oh, Martin, has it gotten that bad?”

“No!” Martin flaps his hand at the phone to ward off Tim’s shit-eating grin — he can hear it perfectly through the receiver — and clutches the phone to his ear tighter. “No, I just meant that it’s about Jon! Kind of. But not like — not like whatever it is you’re implying, which is definitely not— I mean i-it’s. It’s nothing to do with that. Whatever that even is.”

“No need to get so defensive!” Tim is definitely laughing at him. There are heavy, thumping fabric noises over the line like he’s putting his feet up and getting comfortable. “So, it’s not about that whatever-it-is that you know nothing about. Fine. What’s can I do you for?”

Martin taps the fingers of his free hand against his stomach and considers his next words carefully. “I, um. This might sound a bit weird, but I think... I think Jon might’ve followed me here?“

“Here?” Tim repeats. “What do you mean here? Like, to your house? Should I be worried about him trying to slip assignments under my door on the weekends now?”

“No, no, I’m at the seaside. I decided to take a bit of a trip, I thought you knew?”

“Oh, that was for you?”

Martin pulls the phone away for a moment to wrinkle his nose at it, baffled. “What do you mean ‘that was for you?’? Who else would I be asking you about holiday brochures for?”

“Well, you left one of them on Jon’s desk, so I thought you were just trying to get him to take a few days off or something.”

“I what?”

“Yeah. You left it on Jon’s desk. The Skegness one.”

“I didn’t.”

“You did.”

“No, I definitely didn’t.”

“I mean, it looked to me like you did.”

“Tim, I didn’t.” 

“Well, it was there on Jon’s desk, and I know that I didn’t put it there.” 

Martin begins to walk in a random direction down the street, fizzing with impatient, frustrated energy. “So you think, what, you think that Sasha gave it to him? That would be a bit weird, wouldn’t it?”

“I don’t know, would it?”

Martin tugs at his hair and resists the urge to yell down the receiver. God, if he keeps this up he’ll be going bald within the week. If Tim keeps this up, Martin will be putting salt in his tea on Monday. “Tim, I’m serious, this was creepy. It was night, right, and I was on the beach, and Jon was just there. Sitting in the sea. Fully clothed.”

Tim makes a noise at that, and this one isn’t amused. Thoughtful, perhaps. Mildly concerned. Taking Martin seriously, he hopes. “Oh. Did you ask him why?”

“Of course I did! He just... swam off!” 

“Well. That’s a bit freaky.” Tim shuffles around. Puts his thinking face on, Martin would imagine, strokes his chin a bit. “He was asking me about sea monsters, you know.”

Martin goes silent. He isn’t quite sure what his mind is doing, but he doesn’t enjoy it much. Sea monsters. His lips flap open and closed without thought, like it’s trying to say words that his body knows but that his mind can’t quite get a hold of. 

“I can talk to him, if you like?” Tim offers, after a few moments of silence. Or, not exactly silence; on Tim’s end he’ll be getting thick, heavy breathing and the insistent whistling of the wind, along with the insistent squeaking of Martin’s still-slightly-waterlogged shoes. “Like, give him a call, ask him what exactly he wanted me to look up yesterday? Could be he’s gone into kind of exhaustion-induced mania, poor delicate flower that he is.”

“Could you?” Martin asks, somewhat pathetically, once he takes his voice back from wherever it’d gotten to. “This whole thing is really freaking me out.”

“Anything for my beloved coworkers,” Tim says, and there’s a touch of real affection there, right under the thick irony, soothing Martin’s anxiety at least some. “Is the beach nice, other than that?”

Not really, Martin wants to tell him. The weather’s shit, there’s broken glass in the gutter and it smells a bit like piss around the hostel because Martin is broke and he went for one of the cheapest options. “It’s alright,” he says out loud. “I was planning on the the seal sanctuary today, so that should be good.”

“Right, nice.” If this were a face-face conversation, Tim would probably be giving him a bracing pat on the shoulder. “Listen, Martin, we’ll get this sorted out with Jon. There’s bound to be a weird-but-in-a-normal-human-way explanation for all of this.”

And what if there isn’t? Martin thinks. Tim’s thinking it too; he can feel it in the momentary pause in conversation, the quick breaths, the nervous scrape of a foot tapping against something hard, over and over again. “Let me know what he says,” Martin says. 

“Of course,” Tim assures him, and hangs up. 

Martin clutches at his phone for a while. Okay, so Jon probably is here. Someone apparently gave him a brochure, and that person wasn’t Tim or Martin, which is... fine. Jon could well have picked it up in the break room, or found it among some files, since Martin’s always fumbling with them when Jon’s around. And it’s not like Martin’s the only one who’d conceivably benefit from some time off, what with all the worms and the statements. 

Yes, keep going. Keep logic-ing your way through this. So, Jon found the brochure, took it as a sign that he should take some time off for once and came up to Skegness. That’s fine! That’s normal behaviour! Then when he got here, at some point, Jon took to the sea. Well, Martin doesn’t know his boss’s life (although he’d like to, a little bit). Jon could be an extreme free diver in his free time. A crab fisher. A shell collector. A coke addict. He could be like that man Martin had seen a Facebook post about, who could lower his body temperature and safely dive in freezing water, or— or any number of unusual but understandable hobbies. 

But god, does Martin remember Jon’s eyes. They’d been so wide, like polished pebbles in his shining, sea-slick face. So wide and so black that they‘d seemed almost too deep to be black at all, and as wet and reflective as the surface of a still pool. His lips, too, they had been dark, and beneath them had been knife-teeth set narrow and glinting in his mouth, and in Martin’s dreams he had smelt of brackish water and the thing by his bedside had had curved claws for nails, just waiting and watching him, and something— something—

Something had been wrong. Something had been wrong. 

Martinbreathes in chocolatey steam with a shudder to his spine, places his hands flat on table to keep them steady as he billows it back out again. When he’d gone to bed he’d been so certain of his dis-ease, and his dreams had been so vivid.

He’ll wait for Tim to call, and then he’ll figure it out. It’s not even been twenty four hours yet, and he’s beginning to think that taking time away from the Archives was a mistake.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I didn't expect to be updating this so soon (within a day!) but the comments people left gave me a sudden surge of creative energy, so thank you! I should take less than a week to get the next one out - probably not within the next 24 hours, unfortunately. 
> 
> Leave a comment if you'd like, & enjoy! x

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve never written or posted fanfiction before (or any fiction), so this is all a bit new & nervewracking, but I have plans for this that I aim to see through! 
> 
> (The title of this fic is from Yeats’ ‘The Fish’. ‘The Fish’ is a short poem that mostly sucks, but I thought it was appropriate enough, & it was either that or ‘Porphyria’s Lover’. ‘Porphyria’s Lover’ is an excellent poem, but I still haven’t decided if I think that Browning killed his wife or not, & if he did if it was murder, & if he did & it WAS then what that means for the poem & my enjoyment of it, & in particular my usage of it for a piece of fiction about romance & monstrosity. So... ‘The Fish’! Yeah. That works.)
> 
> Anyway, please comment if you enjoyed this! Let me know! I love validation! x


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